So Mark Fletcher will be their newest employee (starting next week?). Congratulations, Mark and Bloglines! Oh, and welcome to the blogosphere, Jeeves!

One thing to note, Ask Jeeves, or any other search company, could build a system like this very quickly. What they would have trouble doing is getting all the data, structured, organized and pulled, going back more than say, a month. That's because blog posts fall off the front pages (depending on frequency of blogging and how many posts the blogger displays) and go into archives. If you think about how many kinds of blog software exist, which means many different kinds of data structures for the blog post data, which then it's very difficult to get all the various types of data structured into a single database, just imagine how all the variants of those professionally and homegrown blog publishing systems differ for archival posts. Lots of people customize their archives, as I have in MT and other blogs I participate in with Wordpress, Typepad, etc. Spidering and structuring archives is really tough, tougher than getting the stuff on the tops of blogs right. The point is, a comprehensive database of blogs structured well, going back a couple of years, is really valuable. As is the knowledge of how to put that database together, and run it, along with understanding why this kind of search is very different than those done by Google or Ask Jeeves, whose results don't understand the temporal qualities of blog data, or other aspects that make it different.

Also, I'm sure Jeeves is asking himself how I know this. I learned it from a couple of folks. Once that happened, it seemed reasonable to blog it.

When Jeeves starts to put ads on the site is when it will be make or break time. A lot of sites (Engadget for example) put up full text RSS feeds. Not only does Bloglines keep this content forever, but it would be putting ads on it.

Free services always diseappear. Rule no 1 for being netsavvy is not to fall in love with a service: they always change or die. So, if Ask Jeeves fucks up Bloglines - it is just to take the hike and migrate to somewhere else.

As simple as that. Remember to export your OPML.

Posted by: Survival of the filthiest at February 5, 2005 04:50 PM

Excellent advice, Survival. I do hope that any new ads manage to slide into the interface without breaking the already busy page, straining it too far and rendering the whole service too distracting. Bloglines is my favorite RSS reader yet -- I can't stand the clumsiness of Firefox's built-in reader, nor the pain of a non-browser reader. What other online services rival Bloglines?

A company in Atlanta called ThePort Network, Inc. (which I am connected with) builds a browser based RSS Reader very competitive with Bloglines, but also has a client Reader (PortReader) like Feed Demon, it's own Blog publishing system (like TypePad)and some very powerful, integrated backend analytics tools. People who like Bloglines might want to learn more about ThePort.

Not to mention those are desktop apps, where there are plenty of alternatives on all platforms.

Bloglines currently really has no competitor even close to it's functionality, so I can only cross my fingers that things don't go wrong.

Posted by: mac at February 6, 2005 10:26 AM

Well it seems that all Search Engines enter into the Blogosphere and like to diversify services in direction of OPML, XML and RSS! After Google has bought Blogger and Microsoft employed Robert Scoble, it's now Ask Jeves to start the blog business!
Welcome to the Blogosphere!

You better take a breath. There are you feeling better now? Now let's think about this rationally and not because some idea you pitched to people at Ask years ago was turned down - there's apparently a spurned lover thing going on with you. Of course anyone can build a 'bloglines' but that doesn't mean people will use it. Ask decided it lacked feed aggregation functioanlity and search and made the correct and bold move to buy one of the best and most used aggregator out there.

Posted by: counter-counterpoint at February 6, 2005 03:35 PM

Lektora is coming to the mac (and linux) real soon. In fact, I'm on a mac right now and using it! It should go public in 1-2 weeks. If you are interested in participating in a private beta, please email me.

Free services always diseappear. Rule no 1 for being netsavvy is not to fall in love with a service: they always change or die. So, if Ask Jeeves fucks up Bloglines - it is just to take the hike and migrate to somewhere else.

this is why the kid stays proprietary, and only tinkers with the services.

only time i'd go with the services is if its a standard, i actually care to pay for it (although that doesn't guarantee existence either), or if the underlying software is open source. if i were a corporation i could afford to think differently about this. as it stands, the kid will always roll his (or others') own on his servers (or ones he's paying for), whenever possible.

Well it seems that all Search Engines enter into the Blogosphere and like to diversify services in direction of OPML, XML and RSS! After Google has bought Blogger and Microsoft employed Robert Scoble, it's now Ask Jeves to start the blog business!

Bloglines lover, do you want seamless synchronization with bloglines via newsreader?
Then Check out greatnews man(http://www.curiostudio.com/).
There’s 4 major reasons why I love it:
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So it’s a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnews’s synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. It’s like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home. Cause the interface and fold hierarchy looks the same like bloglines online version.
2. It’s extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! It’s like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you won’t read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you won’t even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all it’s free.

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.

There are still some sweet points about greatnews I can tell you below just in case you can put a relevant review in your website to let more people to be aware of a sweet piece of software, to less their pain of losing feeddemon.Here we go:
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch. Like I read japanese news to do a research, greatnews displays all these south asian news so well including japanese, Chinese, whatevernese. Feeddemon can’t do this . As far as I know, feeddemon can’t support hebrew news,japanese news, and chinese news well.
** Full text search with keyword highlights. It’s very productive when you consider get things done.
* Integrated internet browser, with popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox. A kill point to please firefox fan.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly. Again a great get things done tool.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
*you can use ’search channel’ to keep eyes on special subject like ‘Ipod’, Like using feeddemon’s search channel and newsgator’s smart feeds. The difference is that smart feeds isn’t free but greatnews is.
There’s 4 major reasons why I love it:
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So it’s a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnews’s synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. It’s like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home.
2. It’s extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! It’s like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you won’t read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you won’t even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all it’s free.

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.

There are still some sweet points about greatnews I can tell you below just in case you can put a relevant review in your website to let more people to be aware of a sweet piece of software, to less their pain of losing feeddemon.Here we go:
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch. Like I read japanese news to do a research, greatnews displays all these south asian news so well including japanese, Chinese, whatevernese. Feeddemon can’t do this . As far as I know, feeddemon can’t support hebrew news,japanese news, and chinese news well.
** Full text search with keyword highlights. It’s very productive when you consider get things done.
* Integrated internet browser, with popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox. A kill point to please firefox fan.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly. Again a great get things done tool.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
*you can use ’search channel’ to keep eyes on special subject like ‘Ipod’, Like using feeddemon’s search channel and newsgator’s smart feeds. The difference is that smart feeds isn’t free but greatnews is.

Posted by: newsfree at July 21, 2005 11:31 AM

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option?>usability. Tick box before ?open rss link in external default browser?.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view?>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.